Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
The issue where students and staff could not access some Re/Play recordings through Blackboard course menu links (Re/Play Collections) has been resolved following a software version update applied overnight on 29th April.
We will continue to closely monitor the service.
The issue with extracting marks from Blackboard to eVision was resolved yesterday, 29 April, at around 5 pm. It was caused by a University-wide issue with Microsoft web applications.
Please accept our apologies for the disruption.
Update: This issue was resolved at around 5 pm on 29 April.
You may be experiencing an issue with extracting marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision, which we believe is being caused by the current IT Services issue with a range of web-hosted applications (noted under “Exam Timetables Down” on the IT Service Status page). We are investigating this and will provide updates here as we have them. In the meantime, it may be necessary to manually enter any marks that are needed in eVision urgently.
Please accept our apologies for this disruption.
Update: A software version update applied overnight on 29th April has resolved the authorisation error.
We are experiencing a technical issue where students and staff cannot access some Re/Play recordings through Blackboard course menu links (Re/Play Collections), when viewing permissions are set to “Only Shared Users”.
Our team is actively working with our service provider to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.
Please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk to arrange a temporary access solution until a permanent resolution is applied.
The supplier has notified us that the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox has been restored.
The incident occurred between 11 April and 17 April. The impact of the issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin has informed us that the issue causing a delay in Similarity Report generation has now been resolved.
Starting at 9.30 AM today, an unexpected service incident occurred in Turnitin causing a delay in the generation of Similarity Reports. The impact of this issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected. Students were still able to submit work, although they may have experienced a delay in receiving their report.
If you have any questions or concerns about this issue, or if you believe you have been affected, please get in touch by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin is currently experiencing an unexpected service incident, which may result in delays in the generation of Similarity Reports. Students are still able to submit work, but they may experience a delay in receiving their report.
The supplier is aware of the issue and is working to restore full functionality to Turnitin.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We are aware of an issue affecting the display of the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox. The issue has been reported to Turnitin Support Engineers, who are currently investigating.
In the meantime, if you need to upload a paper on behalf of a student, there is a workaround available for non-anonymous assignments: selecting the three dots in the Options column for the student and clicking Upload.
For further details, please refer to the guide to Submitting on behalf of a student.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
The annual creation of Blackboard unit courses has been carried out, and the 2025/26 Blackboard courses are available to access. We are now working on building “parent” courses, where these are needed.
This year, all courses are Ultra courses, using the new Ultra templates created with the faculties. You can find your courses in the usual way, by logging in to Blackboard.
Instructor enrolments are copied from the previous year’s courses, where these exist; instructors will need to be manually enrolled onto all new courses. Please contact your school office if you need to be added to any new Blackboard courses.
Information on training and support for Blackboard Ultra is available on the Blackboard Ultra move project site.
Please note that, because of the early creation of courses, some tools that link to other University services outside Blackboard – such as Re/Play and Talis Aspire Resource Lists – will not be fully functional until those services have carried out their annual switch-over. For Re/Play, links to Collections won’t work until mid-July. For resource lists, links can be added to your 2025-26 lists from Thursday 29 May; please contact lib-resource-lists@bristol.ac.uk or your Subject Librarian if you require any support with this.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Blackboard is continuing to investigate an intermittent issue with document rendering in the Annotate tool, which is affecting users globally.
When this happens, students submitting assignments with attachments might see an error message asking them to try again later. Please note that this does not stop the submission, but it can be confusing as students cannot view the document’s content during the upload process. However, students can confirm that their submission has been successful by looking at their digital receipt.
Blackboard developers are collaborating with their partners to fix it, and a solution will be included in a future update.
If you have any questions or encounter this issue and need support, please email us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.